We walk among you without pocket protection.

Follow-Up to “Crash Course (ep. 11) – Cave Story”

If I could sum up my experience with this game in three words, they would be as follows:

“Awesome! Save often.”

I really enjoyed what this game had to offer. The gameplay is enjoyable; the controls don’t have a huge learning curve; the stages were large enough to make each section feel like its own unique chapter, but they were short enough to keep an area from becoming tedious and boring; the teleporters allowed for easy back-tracking and exploration later in the game; the music is phenomenal – it’s just a really solid game.

On the other hand, the story is… odd. There’s not a lot of background given to our silent protagonist. At first I thought he was a little kid, then it’s revealed he’s a soldier from the surface, then you learn he’s a robot as well, and he’s supposed to be fighting the Mimigas (the rabbit-people) – I don’t think I really caught it all in the first play-through. Or, at least, I didn’t understand it all.

That being said, I will admit that I want to go through this game again. After I beat it and the credits finished rolling, I decided to look up a guide for the game online. While going through the game, there were a few rooms that didn’t seem to serve any purpose, and there was at least one treasure chest that I was unable to open. Knowing that part of the game was locked to me, I searched through the guide to see what I missed and what I should have done. Apparently, there is a super-secret ending to the game that you can get if you make a specific series of decisions throughout the game. During this ending, more of the island’s backstory is revealed, and supposedly things make more sense in general. I like to experience the entirety of a narrative, so I guess I’ll have to play through again, but I’m not complaining.

One thing that I had to get used to is that this game doesn’t auto-save for you. Ever. I’ve played plenty of games in the past that haven’t done that (I was raised on those types of games), but a lot of games nowadays have some sort of auto-save checkpoint mechanic built into the progression of the narrative, so it slipped my mind at first to save whenever possible. After dying and being kicked back in time about half an hour on more than one occasion, I became much more vigilant in hitting up every save point from then on out.

Anywhosit, final words on this game are that I very much enjoyed it. I can also see its soundtrack finding its way onto my iPod at some point in the near future. (Seriously – the music is boss as hell!) I wound up beating the game on Easy Mode (yeah, that’s right… what!) in about 5½ hours, so I don’t mind playing through the whole game again to get the super-ultra-special ending.